I have always been interested in the systems we create to make our lives better — and in what happens when those systems begin to shape us in return.
WHY I WRITE
I am fascinated by the human desire to improve things.
Our bodies. Our careers. Our relationships. Our societies. Ourselves.
Technology has given us extraordinary tools for doing this. It can measure us, predict us, understand our behaviour and increasingly help us decide what might be best for us.
But every attempt to optimize human life raises another question:
What gets lost in the process?
My fiction explores that tension — between progress and freedom, ambition and contentment, rational systems and irrational human beings.
I am particularly interested in the places where technology, psychology, culture and our search for meaning collide.
THE HAPPINESS ENGINE
The Happiness Engine is my first novel.
It grew out of years of thinking about happiness, self-improvement, consciousness and technology — and wondering what might happen if our ability to engineer a better life became considerably more powerful than it is today.
Rather than trying to answer that question, I wanted to build a world in which it could play itself out.
THE HAPPINESS ENGINE will be published this September.
I was born in Kyiv, grew up between Ukraine and Canada, and have lived in Berlin for more than a decade. Moving between countries, languages and cultures from an early age made me curious about the stories people tell themselves about who they are, where they belong, and what constitutes a good life.
Long before I began writing fiction, those questions took me through a rather unconventional collection of worlds.
I studied communications, culture and economics in Canada, Spain and Germany. I spent years immersed in yoga, philosophy and questions of consciousness, eventually teaching yoga and building my own business and community around it. I worked with artists and cultural institutions, organized interdisciplinary events, and later moved into education, entrepreneurship and the world of business.
Throughout all of it, I kept returning to the same things: ideas, people, stories, and the connections between seemingly unrelated fields.
Writing became the place where those connections could coexist.
